"If anything, the recent national attention on the UFB rollout is increasing consumer awareness about what UFB can offer – and encouraging more consumers who live in UFB-enabled areas to take advantage of the speed and reliability benefits that Telecom Ultra Fibre offers.

“We’ve also seen a strong pickup in customer inquiries on the back of our Ultra Broadband marketing campaign and our ‘Tech in a Sec’ videos that give helpful tips on things like watching internet videos via your TV.”

Telecom is also expanding its Ultra Fibre services to Canterbury, via UFB partner Enable, with the telco revealing that more than 100 residential and business customers in Canterbury are now piloting Ultra Fibre, in preparation for a full commercial launch in early 2014.

Before Enable, Telecom’s Ultra Fibre sales have been limited to areas within the Chorus UFB footprint (the areas where Chorus has been contracted to lay fibre infrastructure).

Over the past fortnight or so, Ultra Fibre has been ‘switched on’ in Whakatane, Oamaru, Masterton and Gisborne after additional telecommunications backhaul infrastructure was put in place to connect the Telecom network to the Chorus UFB network.

Telecom also released new data usage statistics as part of its monthly Telecom Data Insights report:

· Average home broadband usage is now 34 Gigabytes (GB) per month – up 89% in the past year

· Average usage by Ultra Broadband customers (using Fibre or VDSL technology) is almost three times higher, at 80-90 GB per month

“These figures show how Ultra Broadband customers are hungrier for more and more data," Quin adds.

"It’s driven in particular by video downloads such as YouTube, watching sports online such as the English Premier League football, and using multiple devices such as smartphones and tablets via WiFi off the same home broadband connection.

“As these customers tend to be ‘early adopters’, this gives us a sense of what data usage by Kiwis across the board will be like in the near future.

"The good news is that these figures show heavy data users are well served by Telecom’s top of the range Ultra Broadband plans, which offer 150 GB or even 500 GB per month.”